Well Met

Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture

Rachel Lee Rubin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814763858
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa rinascimentale

The Renaissance Faire—a 50 year-long party, communal ritual, political challenge and cultural wellspring—receives its first sustained historical attention with Well Met. Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major “family friendly” leisure site in the 2000s, Well Met tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the Faire. Well Me t approaches the Faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. Drawing upon vibrant interview material and deep archival research, Rachel Lee Rubin reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible counter cultural referendum on how we live now—our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments. In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and “playtrons.” Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire—the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire’s innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with “ethnic” musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.

1
“Welcome to the Sixties!”

The faire brought the lefties, the artists, the longhairs and the eccentrics out of the woodwork to play together under the trees.

—Alicia Bay Laurel

John Waters’s 1987 movie Hairspray takes place in 1963, the same year in which the first Renaissance faire was held. In a key scene, the movie’s protagonist, Baltimore teenager Tracy Turnblad, convinces her mother to update her old-fashioned hairstyle. Leaving the salon with her nowgroovier mother, and gesturing expansively, Tracy exclaims, “Mama, welcome to the Sixties!”

A history of the Renaissance faire must naturally pivot, as does Waters’s movie, on changes brought by the year 1963. But any genuine understanding of the meaning of the faire must also grapple with what came before. In other words, what cultural conversation did the faire enter? On whose shoulders did it stand, and what transformations did its trumpets and banners herald? Or, to use the framework of Waters’s rebellious teenager, how did the Renaissance faire say to thousands of Californians, “Welcome to the Sixties”?

In a historically urgent way, the most dead-serious thing about the Renaissance faire was, from the very beginning, its sense of whimsy. This whimsy, along with related qualities of spontaneity, surrealism, and irreverence, came to characterize the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as exemplified by the name of the group around author Ken Kesey, who called themselves the “Merry Pranksters.” The poet Allen Ginsberg embraced and elaborated a range of cultural practices he felt make use of these qualities in a speech he made to a group of Unitarian ministers in Boston in 1965; the title of that address was “Renaissance or Die.”

The American Renaissance faire was from its earliest days well situated to marshal a sense of motivated whimsy to serve an antiestablishment agenda. “There was a playfulness and a liberation about the faire,” recalls David Ossman, whose involvement in the faire started in 1963, when he was the drama and literature director at public radio station KPFK, and ultimately powered his founding of the influential comedy troupe Firesign Theater (interview). Indeed, Kevin Patterson asserts that getting people to “play” was the Renaissance faire’s strategy for effecting social change (interview).

This privileging of playfulness remains a hallmark of the faires nearly half a century later; faire participants use the verb “play” more often than is common in American English, with concrete and professional connotations. “I love being a street [wandering] performer because you can play with people,” more than one cast member explains to me, and in many instances, faire-set fiction penned by actual faire participants (as opposed to that written by relative outsiders) can be identified as such by this usage alone. In the 1960s, commentators were well aware that “play” could function as a rather direct repudiation of the status quo. Warren Hinckle, writing in 1967 in the New Left publication Ramparts about the generation of youth becoming known as “hippies,” claimed, “Running around the outside of an insane society, the healthiest thing you can do is laugh.” Hinckle insisted that this laughter can operate as a powerful refusal “in a climate dominated by Dwight Eisenhower in the newspapers and Ed Sullivan on television” (17). Mime Robert Shields, who began his career at the Southern California Renaissance faire and went on from there to become famous as half the duo Shields and Yarnell, chooses an image resonant with Hinckle’s claim to describe his youthful reaction to seeing the faire for the first time: he compares the world outside the faire to the television show Mad Men, set in an advertising agency in the early 1960s, while inside the faire gates, “everything was ‘yes!’” (Shields interview). In 1975, visiting Soviet/Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov recognized the faire as successfully using play to upend all cultural identities. “This fair,” he wrote a year later, “even with all its charm, humor, and chivalry, seemed something like a revolt to me” (131). Seen in this light, the playfulness of the Renaissance faire takes on heft and deliberation, becoming what Kevin Patterson calls an “artistic manifestation of a protest gathering” (interview). But first the faire had to make the unlikely leap from backyard children’s program to hipster affair located centrally in the counterculture.

From Nebraska to Backyard Commedia

The common sense and irreverence of the commedia is a public service.

—Peter Jelen, leatherworker

Although the faire has always been a strikingly collective production, dependent on the talents and involvement of hundreds, longtime participants trace its genesis to a visionary founder: high school English teacher Phyllis Patterson. Patterson was born in 1932 in Nebraska, where she remembers developing an interest in what she calls the “pioneer spirit,” as manifested in literature by works such as Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia.¹ But she came of age in Memphis, Tennessee, during World War II. Patterson’s father, Eldon Carl “EC” Stimbert, served as the superintendent of the Memphis public school district, eventually become state superintendent of schools; he held these leadership posts from 1957 to 1971, when the schools began the process of racial desegregation following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Patterson recalls bringing her new husband home for holidays to a house protected by security details during this time.

Patterson graduated from high school a year early, giving her what she refers to as “a year to waste.” So, in her words, she “wasted it in television”: hosting a Memphis program called Phyl’s Playhouse. Phyl’s Playhouse was a modest yet highly imaginative variety show that introduced some new ideas to a new form; as Patterson tells it, “I can’t say that I was brave or that I was a visionary or anything like that. I just had this idea for a television show that was very simplistic. It had to do with reading poetry on television and reading stories on television. … I actually had the first television show that was done by a woman, I’m sure, in any of the smaller cities” (interview). Phyl’s Playhouse ran for two years, with a show broadcast every Saturday. Meanwhile, Patterson attended Memphis State College. For the “acts” on the show, as well as aspects of its production, she drew heavily on her college friends.

Although it seems like a far distance between the technological advances of television in the 1950s and the antitechnological structure of the Renaissance faire in the 1960s, Patterson is certain that her work on the television show mattered to the faire. This is because of the show’s educational bent and its focus on culture, which contained, according to Patterson, “the essence of what the Renaissance faire was”: “Because this is in miniature what I later made into large—they didn’t have PBS yet. This was a real preparatory to that. … What I wanted to do was to teach through the arts. I didn’t say it that way then. But as I look back, that’s exactly what I was doing. You don’t stray very far from your original passions, not really” (interview).

Patterson ultimately quit doing the show just as it was reaching a new level of success and attracting a sponsor; she realized, she explains, that her work on the show was coming at the expense of her college education. At that time, she was imagining a future in television, but she had particular ambitions for this new medium. She aimed to produce educational content:

I realized that I had to make a clean break and I had to finish my college education if I wanted to really go on and do education on television. I then didn’t see that this [the Phyl’s Playhouse program] could have been that vehicle. I just didn’t see that. … So I went away to Denver University and worked on my master’s. And then I worked on my MRS. And I got my MRS. And then twenty years later, I got an MS.² (Interview)

Patterson moved with her husband, Ron, to the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, and she began teaching high school English. She felt devoted to teaching, but after the birth of her first child, Kevin, in 1960, she decided not to return immediately to the classroom. Rather, she pursued employment that would allow her to make use of her teaching skills while caring for her new baby. In her new neighborhood, she came across a neighborhood newspaper called the Canyon Crier, which “somebody put out to just give want ads and what was going on in this little community of mainly actors, … nothing very serious about it.” She learned from the paper that the neighborhood had a youth center, a nonprofit established in 1949 for the purpose of providing Laurel Canyon’s children with recreational theatrical activities. The youth center was looking to hire someone to teach drama to the children enrolled in its program. Immediately, Patterson approached the listed contacts—and had a meeting with them that impressed her mightily:

[The notice] said, “Wonderland Youth Center Hiring Director for Children’s Theater.” So I went right away to the house of Doris Karnes and Bob Karnes, [to] this incredibly beautiful, Danish-designed house that was two levels. The living room was two levels with a balcony around it. So it was awesome to go into. The woman who came to the door had long red hair almost down to her knees. I’d never seen that before either. (Interview)

At the end of that meeting, Patterson had the job. (The beautiful house was sold to Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees within a handful of years.)

In Patterson’s own accounting, she was so delighted to be hired that she did not ask many questions about what the job would entail. Instead, she just assumed that she would be teaching older children, of the high school and junior high school age with which she was experienced. She envisioned a classroom-sized group of about twenty. In short order, however, she learned from Bob Karnes that she had been mistaken: “He said, ‘Oh, there are eighty of them. And they range in age from six to thirteen years old.’ I had never taught elementary school! I had no idea how to teach elementary school!” (P. Patterson interview).

This abrupt obligation to teach young children posed a great challenge to Patterson’s teaching acumen. The challenge paid off historically, though, because Patterson insists that if she had been correct in her assumption—if she had ended up teaching a small group of high schoolers—then there would never have been a Renaissance faire. “I had to organize these kids into something that they would enjoy,” she explains. “But I did figure it out. I knew how to teach history; I knew how to teach theater.” So Patterson devised the idea of using snippets of plays to teach the younger children about the history of theater. She began to hold the classes in her backyard—“you’d better have classes in your backyard if you have a small baby”—and the cost of a run of eight sessions was two dollars a class, enough to pay a part-time babysitter for her son Kevin, born in 1960, and his brother, Brian, born in 1966 (P. Patterson interview). (Both sons spent much of their childhood at the faire and continued their involvement into their adulthood, Kevin as a producer and Brian as a puppeteer.)

Patterson divided the children in the classes into smaller, more manageable groups, so that no child had to “be a tree or a bush or something and not say anything or just stand there and hold a banner,” and the groups were given different historical theatrical forms to work with. The youngest performed as the earliest storytellers, dressed in ragged “caveman” costumes. Others acted the part of a Greek chorus. One of the most popular theatrical forms with the children was the commedia dell’arte.

Commedia, a “lowbrow” form of popular entertainment, evolved during the Italian Renaissance, when traveling troupes of professional actors performed it outdoors. In the words of cultural historian Martin Green, the commedia “belonged to the world of entertainment—to circus and carnival, not to the high arts like tragedy” (xvii). Its history, Green and coauthor John Swan tell us, is difficult to delineate, because commedia “was such an unofficial or antiofficial phenomenon” (1). It used stock characters to develop satirical social plots, often calling social hierarchy into question or inverting it the way Shakespeare would do in his plays when the Renaissance reached England.

Teaching children the style and narratives of commedia dell’arte was, of course, exactly the combination lesson in history and theater that Patterson was shooting for. But many elements of the comic form were also well designed to capture the imagination of squirmy children, which was necessarily Patterson’s primary goal. As it turned out, the child actors/ pupils were delighted by commedia’s privileging of improvisation, its use of masked fools, its acrobatic tricks and music, its plots of intrigue. They learned about the character Arlecchino, who carried two sticks tied together which he struck to make a loud noise—giving birth to the word slapstick—while experiencing the usual children’s glee with pratfalls and loud noises.

Because so many residents of Laurel Canyon worked in the film industry, they had skills to donate to the children’s theater classes, and connections to get other things that were needed. Doris Karnes, for instance, worked with the children’s parents to make some eighty costumes for the performances. Dancer Connie Spriestersbach, who had spent time in China, contributed her knowledge of Chinese theater. Noted folk artist (and music-playing buddy of Woody Guthrie) Ed Mann, whose twin boys were in the program, built a cart to invoke the traveling nature of the commedia; the performing troupe would be transported from town to town in a cart, which would also serve as a makeshift stage. There was professional equipment, borrowed from various places, but the homemade cart was more lasting:

And then when that summer was over, by that time, the father of one of the kids had built a cart for the commedia play. So that made that the most traveling theater. Because the stage that was loaned to us by NBC got taken back to NBC. The lights went back to CBS, wherever they went back to. I mean, we had all this stuff, but we didn’t get to keep it. … Several years later, kids who came up to my backyard said, “You know that cart? We want to do that cart again.” (P. Patterson interview)

The kids did get to “do that cart again,” at the request of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), which invited the group to stage its commedia the following year at a festival in Los Angeles. Conceived of as a national, self-supporting theatrical alternative to for-profit Broadway theaters, ANTA had been established by Congress in 1935 at the same time as the Federal Theatre Project. ANTA began to develop in earnest after World War II and in 1955 had issued a statement that “ANTA’s primary task is to bring the best plays, interpreted by the best actors, at minimum cost to the nation.” Obviously, Patterson’s young performers were not professional actors, but they did exemplify community involvement in region-based theatrical activity, and their performance was a success:

The kids loved to do that. … Nobody else was here out of that whole group of eighty kids, just these ten. And they got to feel a little important. And they thought that we should just take that cart, and we should go around the schools. And they kept bothering me and bothering me about it. And if those kids had not done that, there would have been no Renaissance faires. Because I wasn’t trying to do that again. I was just trying to teach in the backyard. (P. Patterson interview)

As the Renaissance faire became well established, Ron and Phyllis Patterson drafted a sort of retrospective “vision statement” of their own, which now hangs in Kevin Patterson’s office; in the statement, Ron and Phyllis noted how the faire flowed naturally out of these experiments with commedia:

The idea didn’t come on us in full bloom. It grew originally from the fact that Phyllis was doing Commedia dell’Arte with children. Improvisation on a travelling players-cart was great fun and we imagined it could be even more fun surrounded with jesters and jugglers, tumblers and pipers, piemen and other 16th Century entertainers, to more fully re-create the festivity of that time.

As we began to get caught up in the idea it seemed more and more important to be authentic. We imagined everyone in costumes and no microphones or other 20th Century mechanical devices. Perhaps it could develop into a real fair! And perhaps other people who still believe in personal involvement would help create it.

The commedia dell’arte was to set the artistic tone of the Renaissance faire in a lasting way; elements of it still flourish at the twenty-first-century faire. Faires’ “street characters,” actors who wander the faire site and interact with visitors instead of performing on stages, harken back to the use of improvisation to create social narratives in conversation with audiences. From both street characters and onstage performers, visitors see descendants of the commedia’s Harlequin/Pierrot figure, the most lasting one to come out of commedia, enacting their ridiculous parody in the open air; the famous mime Robert Shields, who got his start at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Northern California, began by playing the Harlequin in a homemade costume.

In addition to these commedia-influenced performances, crafters’ booths still sell artwork that invokes commedia dell’arte. For instance, mask maker Peter Jelen creates leather masks intended to be worn by stock commedia characters. Unlike the common flat masks, he explains, the commedia masks do not resemble the face underneath; instead, they transform the wearer into the archetypal caricatures they represent. As is the case with many Renaissance festival crafters, Jelen is very aware of the art history behind his craft, having done his own research about commedia before he began selling the masks.

Jelen considers it a “natural” thing for him to make commedia masks, because “there is a free-spirited and rebellious nature to renfairs [sic] in the same way that the commedia troupes were the sacred fools of their day. Both are definitely theaters of the people. Even as a vendor at the festival I find the atmosphere much more free in how I deal with the customer than in other venues” (Jelen email). Here Jelen is underscoring the defining qualities of commedia that led Martin Green and John Swan to praise it as “illegitimate theater” (9).

Jelen is correct that the commedia’s overall rowdiness and deliberate flouting of respectability contributed much of the Renaissance faire’s spirit, which made the faire a natural haven for the counterculture but immediately raised the hackles of cultural conservatives (and, indeed, continues to do so). As I will discuss, this has caused some practical difficulties and occasional consternation for faire organizers and participants, but this hackle-raising has always been a point of commedia, accounting, according to Martin Green, for its influence on cultural figures ranging from director Federico Fellini to musician David Bowie to comedian Charlie Chaplin. (Perhaps not coincidentally, another actor who got his start at the Renaissance festival, Billy Scudder, has made a career of playing Charlie Chaplin.) In Green’s account, the images of commedia, both in its original moment and in its various survivals,

all represent a recoil from our society’s dominant respe...